The King's word or when saying is doing

Politics begins with words, like any human and social action; at the same time, it is not contradicted by silence, which can sometimes constitute one of its many expressions.  This includes in itself a paradox, especially in the minds of people whose political practice is linked to noise and chatter. 

But what does silence mean, and how can silence be understood as a political position? Perhaps, I think, silence not only has political meaning, but has become useful in a political world full of noise. There is evidence in the Arabic rhetorical heritage that silence is a high level of eloquence, sometimes more eloquent than speech, in its ability to clarify and convey meaning, as well as to enrich the process of understanding and making understood. 

Sun Tzu, the famous author of "The Art of War", who lived two and a half thousand years ago (5th century B.C.) in a China ravaged by internal dissension, believed that the greatest victories are those won without battle. Can this belief be applied to rhetoric? How can one convince without resorting to the arsenal of sophistic arguments and other stratagems enumerated by Schopenhauer in his "Art of Always Being Right" [published in 1864]?  Perhaps the answer is to be found in the linguistic theorists who have been able to point out that, between silence and explicit discourse, the force of an argument is very often built in an intermediate zone: that of the unsaid.  

From this point of view, the rhetoric of His Majesty King Mohammed VI's speech sometimes prompts us to think of silence as language, perhaps as one of the most persuasive arguments of this language, where the unsaid, the silence charged with meaning and the unspoken truths constitute other forms of expression of meaning in royal discourse. 

When HM addressed the nation on the occasion of the 48th anniversary of the Green March, he dwelt little on the context of the political and diplomatic evolution of the Moroccan Sahara issue, a context that was marked by two events that took place successively a week before the speech, the terrorist attack on the civilian population of Es-Smara on the night of 28-29 October, and the adoption on 30 October 2023 by the UN Security Council of Resolution 2703, renewing MINURSO's mandate for one year until the end of October 2024. 

Paying little attention to Morocco's diplomatic achievements and the manoeuvres of the "declared and covert" adversaries, the Sovereign wished to focus his speech on the constructive perspective of the question of the Moroccan Sahara rather than on its conflictual dimension, thus giving a prominent place in his speech to the development projects currently being carried out in the southern provinces and the strategic vision underpinning them, which gives the impression that the strategy of valuing diplomatic achievements, clarifying positions and mobilising support, as key elements in the King's discursive construction of the Moroccanness of the Sahara, is perhaps giving way to what His Majesty called in the same speech "the marches of development, modernisation and construction, to honour the Moroccan citizen, making the best use of the potentialities that abound in our country, particularly in the Moroccan Sahara", so we can say that the little attention paid in the royal speech to the evolution of the artificial conflict over the Moroccan Sahara constitutes a clear and eloquent message to whomever it may concern.  

Thus, the relevance of the royal discourse lies in general, in what the King says, but also in what he does not say, and it lies in this discourse in particular, in the discursive rhetoric that keeps silent in the face of the different hostile manoeuvres to Morocco's territorial integrity, in such a way that we can attribute sense and meaning to this silence, easily understanding that these are facts that no longer deserve attention, nor to be expressed in the King's word, which produces at the same time a special meaning, that of the silence of power, as well as of the power of silence.  

Thanks to this semantics of silence we can pertinently understand the rhetoric of what today truly deserves attention, we can even better appreciate all that the Green March can inspire in us as a metaphor for the march forward, for proactive movement, for innovative dynamism and for the barriers to be broken down for the strengthening of regional integration and the consolidation of the Atlantic dimension of the Kingdom.   

Like Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March in 1930, as well as Martin Luther King's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Hassan II's Green March into the Saharan territory was a decisive turning point in Morocco's modern history and an outstanding moment in the national consciousness of the Moroccan people. It has been and will remain the absolute symbol of the symbiosis that indissolubly unites the Throne and the People; but also an inexhaustible source of inspiration for development and progress as His Majesty underlined in the same speech by stating that "faithful to his immortal oath, we continue the marches of development, modernisation and construction". 

When His Majesty said in his speech on the occasion of the 48th anniversary of the Green March that "we are continuing the marches of development", he was not merely stating an action, he was doing it by the very fact of uttering "this phrase, just as when he said "hence our desire to develop the national coastal area, including the Atlantic coast of the Moroccan Sahara, along with the structuring of this geopolitical area at the African level", he not only revealed a new geopolitical perspective of development, but also announced it and set it in motion.  

This is also true when he says that "we are committed to completing the implementation of the mega-projects that are underway" and when he adds "without forgetting to think about the formation of a strong and competitive national commercial maritime fleet" and that "we must continue to work to establish a maritime economy that contributes to the development of the region" or when he calls for "the adoption of a special strategy for Atlantic tourism", or when it launches "an initiative for the creation of an institutional framework to bring together the 23 African countries of the Atlantic seaboard" or offers "the Sahel countries access to the Atlantic Ocean" or expresses Morocco's willingness to "place its road, port and railway infrastructures at the disposal of these brotherly countries", because it is not describing reality as do "statements of fact" intended to transmit information, but is taking action in such a way that the act of promising, announcing and guiding is carried out at the very moment when the utterance is made.  

We are dealing here with "speech acts" which by the very fact of being uttered perform the deed, and thus the "performative utterances" in the King's Word do not describe deeds, but perform actions.